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Tacos y Carnitas Sahuayo is a Mexican restaurant in Santa Ana. Veer from the meats you usually get, and go with the naughty bits instead. You’ll discover a restaurant that takes the current foodie obsession with nose-to-tail eating literally and beautifully. You get a hint of this methodology from the restaurant’s name—Sahuayo, of course, is the Michoacán city that functions as the Iowa of Santa Ana, a place that has sent thousands of its residents to our county seat over the past 60 years. These are people whose worship of pig makes our obsession with bacon seem vegan--carnitas, most famously, but also chicharrones, blood pudding, ears and virtually every part of the animal. Slabs of chicharrones bake under heat lamps near the front--some as large as a desk calendar, others rutted like a timing belt, both concentrated fat from which one can only weather two or three bites before collapsing in a quivering, frothing food coma.

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The tacos and carnitas at Tacos y Carnitas Sahuayo in Santa Ana are fine at best, and mostly inconsistent—if you go with the tried and true. The carne asada is juicy, crisped on its edges, but the al pastor is too oily, the ch...